THE ASA/MAA JOINT COMMITTEE ON UNDERGRADUATE STATISTICS AND ITS
NSF-FUNDED WORKSHOPS

George W. Cobb
Mount Holyoke College

Newsletter for the Section on Statistical Education
Volume 1, Number 2 (Summer 1995)

In 1990 the Mathematical Association of America invited the ASA to collaborate
in forming an ad hoc joint committee on undergraduate statistics. The
committee, which has roughly two dozen members, holds two open meetings a year:
one at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January, and one at the Joint
Statistics Meetings in August.

Here are some of the group's activities:

1991 MAA's Curricular Action Project made statistics the subject of one of its
five focus groups (See Steen, 1992 for the group's report).

1992 Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences Chairs' Colloquium: George
Cobb presented the recommendations of the Focus group.

The MAA's STATS project (Statistical Thinking and Teaching Statistics) was
designed for mathematicians, who teach statistics but who do not have recent or
advanced training in the subject, in order to introduce them to some recent
developments in statistics, especially those that distinguish statistics from
mathematics. Each workshop is run by a coordinator and two presenters, all
nationally known statisticians committed to education and actively involved in
applied work. Funding is provided by a grant to the MAA from the Division of
Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation.

In all, nine regional workshops have been funded: two were held in 1993 and
three in 1994, with four more planned for summer 1995. For the three years
combined, we have received about 500 applications for the 216 available places.
The number and nature of the applications we received has been a gratifying
confirmation that there is a need for the workshops, and that the intended
audience can indeed be reached. The vast majority of the applicants (roughly
90%) have met our two main criteria: they are (1) involved in teaching
statistics to undergraduates, but (2) without recent or formal training in
statistics. Roughly half of the applicants have had no post-baccalaureate
training in the subject at all. (Surely no other subject in the sciences is so
often taught by those with so little training in the subject.)